Page Comparison

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• Stevedore extension points should be provided for each of the common UX changes that need to be made
  • Note: see the Audit below for a comprehensive list
  • An initial list would include:
    • "Feature flag"
      • Note: this will be a ConfigurationModel derivative (which includes a built-in enabled column)
      • We recommend this over using a Django settings feature flag
      • It would be useful to allow all associated extensions obey the feature flag automatically
    • URLs for new UI and REST APIs
    • LMS tabs (although the concept should be more general as mobile won't render these items as tabs)
    • Instructor Dashboard components/tabs
    • New Studio editing tabs for xblocks
    It would be useful to allow a feature to be enabled or disabled once and have all of its extensions follow
• XBlocks should be extended to provide more capabilities
  • Course-scoped fields for configuration settings
  • Admin views for both Studio and LMS
  • Need built-in support for RequireJS or AMD compliant dependency management
• The Django asset pipeline needs to be improved
  • Have the pipeline pick up assets from all installed Django apps (to support CDNs, minification etc)
    
    • A spike was done at the beginning of the quarter: PR 7610: Django extension spike
  • RequireJS Optimizer support should be added to the LMS
    
    • See RequireJS in the LMS
• There are some interesting aspects of supporting arbitrary plug-ins
  
  • An order must be established for visual aspects such as tabs. Today the order is implicit in the hard-coded list.
    • If in doubt, sort the items alphabetically by name
  • How can plug-ins adopt the correct look-and-feel?
    • An initial thought is that we could document the boilerplate that each plug-in type should include
    • Miki suggests that maybe we should use inheritance to our benefit here, where the superclass renders the boilerplate
    • Eventually we might want to use a mechanism more like XBlock that can be rendered inline
  • It needs to be decided how mobile can benefit from these plug-ins
    • If they provide new UI as URLs then they won't just drop in to mobile
    • XBlocks will just appear, but only by using a web view to render the HTML
    • React, a JavaScript library from Facebook, might help with native rendering of HTML

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